This demonstration left their guests astounded and, most important to the Polos, impressed. “Those whom they had formerly doubted,” wrote Ramusio, “were indeed those honored and valorous gentlemen of the House of Polo, and they did them great honor and reverence. And when this thing became known throughout Venice, straightway did the whole city, the gentry as well as the common folk, flock to their house, to embrace them and to shower them with caresses and show demonstrations of affection and reverence, as great as you can possibly imagine.”
Although Ramusio’s tale concluded happily, it stands as a sardonic commentary on the superficiality and materialism of Venetians. They were unwilling—indeed, unable—to recognize Marco, Maffeo, and Niccolò until the three staged a theatrical display of their wealth.
The startling dinner marked the beginning of the rehabilitation of the newly returned Polos. Thereafter, the three received the respect they felt they deserved from their fellow citizens, with Marco singled out for special attention. “All the young men went every day continuously to visit and converse with Messer Marco,” Ramusio claimed, “who was most charming and gracious, and to ask of him matters concerning Cathay and the Great Khan, and he responded with so much kindness that all felt themselves to be in a certain manner indebted to him.”
IT IS EASY to understand why Marco attracted notice. The significance of the inventions that he brought back from China, or which he later described in his Travels, cannot be overstated. At first, Europeans regarded these technological marvels with disbelief, but eventually they adopted them.
Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco’s return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West.
Coal, another item that had caught Marco’s attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe.
Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope—which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance—and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope—based on the same technology—to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun.
Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols.
Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land.
In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance—or, for that matter, the modern world—without the benefit of Marco Polo’s example of cultural transmission between East and West.
BENEATH ITS PLACID SURFACE, the Republic of Venice was ailing at the time of Marco’s return. The reign of Lorenzo Tiepolo, the doge when the Polo company departed, had been marked by one setback after another—first famine, then unnecessary squabbles with neighbors whom Venice alienated by imposing tariffs on foreign shipping, a gesture that served only to lessen trade. At about this time, the Republic embarked on three years of military skirmishes with Bologna. Not surprisingly, relations with northern Italy deteriorated badly.
Matters worsened when Venice refused to aid the Church in the War of the Sicilian Vespers, a protracted conflict (1282–1302) pitting King Peter III of Aragon against Pope Martin IV. In retaliation, the Church put an ironclad ban in place, beginning in 1284. Mass could not be said in San Marco; the bells high in the campanile remained eerily silent. The religious pageantry that marked Venetian life—weddings, funerals, even baptisms—was strictly forbidden. The ban extended to the last rites; those denied them might suffer even worse torments in the afterlife. Winter arrived and departed without the celebration of Christmas. As Venice fell silent and penitent before the Absolute, it seemed that God had banished it to a mournful purgatory. “For the past twenty years nothing seemed to have gone right for them,” writes the historian John Julius Norwich of the Republic’s plight. “Militarily they had suffered defeats on land and sea, with serious losses, both in ships and human lives. They had been forced to watch, powerless, while the enemy penetrated to the very confines of the lagoon. Their neighbors, on many of whom they depended for trade, were in a greater or lesser degree unfriendly. Their chief colony, Crete, was once again in revolt.”
As if to confirm the impression of divine disfavor, an earthquake shook the fragile city to its foundations that winter. When the earth’s crust trembled, floods wrought havoc in Venice, claiming homes, destroying lives, leaving some citizens to starve amid ruined splendor. Its civic infrastructure still intact, Venice rallied and managed to maintain a veneer of prosperity and might despite disaster. But behind the scenes, the Republic had fallen on hard times, with no prospect of relief.
VENETIANS BLAMED their decline on a coterie of elite families that had amassed wealth during these difficult years, rather than on natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, the Republic’s disastrously confused foreign policies, the Church, or jealous rivals—all of which had done actual harm to Venice. In particular, the tightly knit Dandolo clan was held responsible; during the worst of the Republic’s recent troubles, two doges had happened to be Dandolos, including Giovanni Dandolo, who held the office during the trying period from 1280 to 1289.
During his tenure, the Piazza San Marco reverberated with public demonstrations in favor of a rival family, the Tiepolos, who harked back to the Republic’s traditional democratic character. Giacomo Tiepolo, the son of a doge, found himself poised to lead the Republic in these troubled times. Marco may have reflected that Tiepolo faced some of the same pressures as the Great Khan. On the one hand, Tiepolo had to satisfy a core group of like-minded supporters, and on the other, he had to cultivate his popular base. Insiders warned that Venice was becoming too democratic and was teetering on the verge of mob rule, while populists believed that Tiepolo planned to establish a hereditary monarchy in Venice.
Under pressure from all sides, Tiepolo went into exile on the mainland. At the same time, 1289, Pietro Gradenigo, the thirty-eight-year-old scion of a newly rich merchant family, was grudgingly elected the next doge, acquiring in the process a condescending nickname, Pierazzo. No matter who occupied the Doge’s Palace, whether autocrat or populist, Venice’s deterioration accelerated.
IN 1291, the sultan of Egypt, Al-Ashraf Khalil, fulfilling a long-held vow, had overrun Acre and killed most of its residents. The shock was felt thousands of miles away in Venice, since Acre had served as a staging area for merchants and their goods, just as it had for the Polos.
With the fall of Acre and other Christian outposts in the Middle East, Venetians turned their attention toward Europe. Ships sailed to destinations as varied as Amsterdam, London, and Marseilles. Venetian merchants learned to distract and entertain neglected feudal barons with a traveling menagerie of animals, clowns, musicians, and acrobats before transacting business. The doge encouraged trade with the West, exempting himself alone from the necessity of paying duty on the items he acquired.
IN TIME, the Republic’s struggles against commercial and military rivals drew Marco Polo into the fray. On this occasion, the main irritant was Genoa. That city-state, every bit as avaricious as Venice, jealously guarded its trade in spices from India and grain from the Crimea, as well as fish, salt, furs, and even slaves. Anything that could be bought and sold became fuel for Genoa’s economic engine.
To prevent outright conflict, Venice and Genoa had established a flimsy treaty, but the fall of Acre upset the balance, for both parties wanted control over that city. In preparation for war ag
ainst its rival, Venice joined forces with a lesser power, Pisa. This time, the allies meant business: all those of sound mind and body between the ages of seventeen and sixty were eligible to be drafted at any moment. Furthermore, the wealthiest families were each expected to finance and equip one or more galleys. The Polos were not of their exalted rank; nevertheless, Marco became caught up in war fever. He was responding, in part, to a dramatic change in the Venetian mood. After years of decline, the Republic was suddenly ready to fight to defend its reputation and interests.
Marco may have thrown himself recklessly into the conflict out of boredom with his life. In Venice, he was hemmed in by gray, brown, and ocher buildings looming over cramped, sometimes fetid canals. Instead of roaming the Steppe on horseback, or trekking across deserts in a camel caravan, Marco was negotiating the streets of Venice, some of them so narrow that he had to turn sideways to thread his way along them. Instead of seeing all the way to the horizon, he looked no farther than the windows of his neighbors as they went about their domestic routines. The grandeur and sense of adventure had been drained from his life, replaced by the routines of the merchants of Venice, their accounts and debts, their tiresome lawsuits and contentious families. For the man who had ridden with the Mongols and worshipped with the Buddhists, these restraints may have become unbearable.
In 1298, Marco was only forty-three, still capable of responding to any hint of adventure that came his way. The Battle of Curzola, in which he was taken prisoner, was not the glorious occasion for which Venice had hoped. But it may have offered the escape that he needed.
It is possible that Marco’s capture by the Genoese and privileged confinement came as a relief, allowing him to keep his distance from Venice and its restraints for a while. Paradoxically, he was freer in jail, where his daily needs were met and his mind could roam across the face of the world—the Pamir highlands, the Gobi Desert and the emerald Steppe, the gers of Mongolia, all the way to the fantastic palaces of Cambulac and Xanadu. It took the ordeal of confinement in prison to get the world traveler to sit still long enough to tell his story, and it is easy to imagine him talking night and day about his adventures to Rustichello, who enthusiastically assembled Marco’s feverish outpourings for European consumption. It had been an open question as to whether Marco could persuade his contentious Venetian neighbors, let alone all of Europe, of his fabulous exploits, but his collaboration with Rustichello promised to do just that.
As a popular writer accustomed to filling out his tales with courtly Arthurian romances and stirring battle scenes, Rustichello had distinct ideas about how to embellish Marco’s factual account with stock elements. But the veteran merchant preferred to emphasize events he had witnessed. Yet Marco’s perspective differed from that of his audience; his assumptions about the world, and Christendom’s place in it, were not their assumptions. After decades abroad, he was steeped in Mongol customs, Mongol languages, and the Mongol worldview, and he looked at life through Mongol eyes—vital, barbaric, and reverent.
RUSTICHELLO OF PISA was not merely a romance writer. He belonged to a family of notaries, and was qualified in the profession. In Italy, notaries have long enjoyed high status. In Roman antiquity, they were august public officials who drew up contracts and financial arrangements, and recorded and approved transfers of property, deeds, and wills; they left the tedious work of copying to their slaves. Their name derived from a widely employed system of shorthand writing, known in Latin as notae Tironinae, after Cicero’s secretary, M. Tullius Tiro, said to have invented the system while taking down Cicero’s prolix speeches. A scribe employing the system was called a notarius, and he traveled in the highest circles of the Roman government bureaucracy; his Christian successors, notarii, dutifully recorded the sermons of preachers as well as legal proceedings against Christian martyrs. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, notaries became papal appointees whose authority extended throughout Christendom. They were an integral part of the legal system. In his capacity as a notary, Rustichello could certify the veracity of Marco’s adventures.
Rustichello’s literary imagination tended toward battles and knights errant and virtuous maidens, but his legal training prompted him to require verification from Marco. How could he document his travels, to say nothing of the fantastic episodes he claimed to have witnessed? In answer to this question, Rustichello offers a glimpse into Marco’s working method. Marco, Rustichello writes, “noted down only a few things which he still kept in his mind; and they are little compared to the many and almost infinite things which he would have been able to write if he had believed it possible to return to these our parts; but thinking it almost impossible ever to leave the service of the Great Khan, king of the Tartars, he wrote only a few small things in his notebooks.”
Fortunately for posterity—and for Rustichello—all was not lost, because Marco sent for and received his notebooks while in prison, and with these in hand to prompt his memory, he “caused all these things to be recounted in order by Master Rustichello, citizen of Pisa, who was with him in the same prison in Genoa, at the time when it was 1298 years since the birth of our Lord Master Jesus Christ.”
MARCO WAS FAMILIAR with Persian and with Mongol tongues unknown in the West, not to mention the Venetian dialect, but none suited the epic that Rustichello and he contemplated. Only French, the language of romances—that is, adventure tales—would do, but there is no evidence that Marco was familiar with it. Rustichello, however, did know French, or at least an idiosyncratic, nongrammatical version of the language (the thought of his attempting to speak French is painful to contemplate); so the two Italians composed their Asian epic in that tongue. The rigors of language posed a serious problem for Marco’s amanuensis. Rustichello mangled French syntax. At times he refers to Marco Polo in the first person, at other times, in the third, without any apparent reason for the change. The book itself is sometimes described as “my book,” meaning Polo’s, and sometimes as “our book,” the fruit of a collaboration. Rustichello frequently spells the same word various ways, even on the same page. Tenses, which can be especially complex in French, proved difficult for him to master, and so the narrative fluctuates between the present tense and various past tenses, often in the same sentence. His nongrammatical French would become the despair of centuries of translators trying to divine his precise meaning.
MARCO’S EXPERIENCE of the world, his imagination, and his ego far exceeded Rustichello’s capacities, and the two collaborators often failed to achieve a harmoniously blended voice. Rustichello tried to impose his idea of proper literary form and Christian ideals on the unruly Marco, but as their account took wing, Rustichello apparently let the hyperactive traveler have his blasphemous way. With his conventional narrative formulas and mannerisms, and his constant straining for effect, Rustichello lacked the gift of sprezzatura, the art that conceals art. But Marco, having honed his stories by telling and retelling them, and fired by his shrewd and contagious enthusiasm, overflowed with sprezzatura. As a result, the amateur storyteller outdid the professional. Given the stark differences between the collaborators, one can practically hear them quarreling over the narrative, with all its awkward compromises, abrupt shifts in tone, and glaring inconsistencies. Like a medieval cathedral fashioned by anonymous artisans, the result is a spectacular but disorderly accretion of ideas, and of first, second, and third thoughts—an accidental monument to vanished civilizations.
Despite his limitations, Rustichello ultimately succeeded in his task. Without the stubborn Pisan to force the Venetian wayfarer to sit still long enough to dictate his overflowing reminiscences, the story of Marco’s travels would never have been written. It would have remained nothing more than outlandish scuttlebutt among the fraternity of merchants traveling the Silk Road, and the stories that Marco told would have died with him.
SEASONED ROMANCE WRITER that he was, Rustichello of Pisa did not hesitate to include a colorful, entertaining battle scene lifted nearly word for word from one of his earlie
r works. He borrowed the opening of his earlier success, Méliadus, a compilation of traditional Arthurian romances, employing nearly the same words for the introduction to Marco Polo’s account.
“Lords, Emperors, Kings, Dukes and Marquesses, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses, and all people who are pleased and wish to know the different generations of men and the diversities of the different regions and lands of the world,” Rustichello begins, “take then this book and have it read, and here you will find all the greatest marvels and the great diversities of the Greater and Lesser Armenia, and of Persia, Media, Turkey, and of the Tartars and India and of many other provinces about Asia Media and part of Europe, going toward the Greek wind, levant, and tramontaine, just as our book will tell you clearly in order, as Master Marco Polo, wise and noble citizen of Venice, relates because he saw them with his own eyes.”
From that point forward, Marco’s account departs from traditional romances, and he emerges as the beguiling and boisterous traveler of renown, a man who became the intimate of Kublai Khan, and even something of a Mongol himself. Caught up in their mutual excitement, the collaborators remark that no one, neither “Christian, Saracen, nor pagan nor Tartar nor Indian nor any man of any kind…saw and knew or inquired so much of the different parts of the world and of the great wonders so much as this Master Marco Polo searched out and knows.” With that, his tale takes on an unpredictable life of its own.
Marco’s voice, even when adulterated by Rustichello’s conventional derring-do, is like no other, one moment as dry and precise as the tax assessor and merchant he had been, the next as florid as a fabulist, his sense of conviction lightened with a conspiratorial wink. If this narrative voice, as rendered by Rustichello, captures the energy and intensity of the Marco Polo who appeared before his Genoese captors, it is easy to understand why he transfixed them. Only Marco had had the luck, for good or ill, to be imprisoned within the Mongol Empire for decades, and only Marco possessed the sympathetic imagination to identify completely with it, and to portray it with passion and authenticity.
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